Happy birthday!

Yesterday was Older Daughter's 19th birthday!

Seems hard to believe that our little Christmas baby is all grown up.

We didn't have anything particularly special planned for the day, but she received an unexpected gift. Some friends who were upgrading to a newer model iPad passed on their older one to her. (I thought it was telling that our relatively low-tech daughter took one look at it and said, "What's that?")

But with the ease all young people seem to have with electronics, she soon figured it out.

Cooked one of her favorite dinners, chicken piccata and Brussels sprouts.

In lieu of cake, she preferred two store-bought chocolate cream pies.

Happy birthday Older Daughter!

What's for dinner?

Reader Maria liked the recipe for chicken piccata so much that she served it on Sunday. "Guess what we just enjoyed for our Resurrection Sunday dinner?" she wrote. "I served your chicken piccata (which a friend said can also be called chicken milanesa) with rice and orzo pilaf, asparagus shoots and fruit gelatin. Can we post pictures here?"

She attached a picture under a separate email. Yum, looks fabulous!

Chicken piccata

Back in my single days, I sometimes bought frozen dinners, ug. Well I say "ug" now, but back then I found a few that I liked quite well. One of them was for a dish called Chicken Piccata, which until that point I'd never heard of.

A couple years ago while leafing through one of my favorite cookbooks, what should I see but a recipe for chicken piccata! It turned out to be a delicious dish, and now I make it fairly often.

Here's the recipe. Since I was cooking three pounds of chicken, I multiplied it numerous times. Don't follow the measurements too slavishly -- feel free to tweak as you wish. This is a very forgiving recipe.

I start by beating together eggs and milk. The bowl should be roomy.

Next, crushed cornflakes and flour. While the recipe calls for equal amounts of crushed cornflakes and flour, I tend to lean more toward about a 2:1 ratio. More cornflakes gives the chicken a golden crust.

The chicken needs to be pounded flat. I lay a piece on some waxed paper...

...and lay another piece of waxed paper over it. This is because I use my husband's rubber shop mallet for pounding, and it's not exactly clean.

Pound the chicken, but don't go too crazy. You don't want it paper-thin, you just want it flat. Lay the pounded chicken aside on a plate and do another piece.

When all the chicken is pounded, melt some butter with minced garlic in a fry pan.

Dredge each chicken piece first in the egg/milk mix...

...then in the cornflakes/flour mixture. Make sure the chicken gets thoroughly coated.

Then pan-fry everything. Keep the temperature fairly low and don't rush this step because the chicken crust can easily burn.

When you flip the chicken, you'll see the beautiful golden color of the coating.

When the chicken is cooked, the girls just dive in; but Don and I enjoy sautéed mushrooms with it. I use one of the fry pans and add a bit more butter and garlic, along with some lemon juice. I usually have canned mushrooms in the pantry, so I use those.

Serve with a green vegetable, and you've got a really really really good dinner.